1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and print device control method and, more particularly, to control of a print job.
2. Description of the Related Art
Along with the development of networking in recent years, an environment in which a plurality of information processing apparatuses connected on a network sharing a printer on that network is becoming increasingly popular. In such environment in which a plurality of information processing apparatuses share a printer, these information processing apparatuses issue print requests and the like to one printer. When a single printer accepts print requests from a plurality of information processing apparatuses and executes copy operations, discharged printed materials are mixed with those of other users, and as a result, printed materials may be lost.
Some proposals have been made to solve such problem. As one of such proposals, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 09-134261 proposes a method which spools accepted print jobs, combines a plurality of spooled print jobs into one print job, and sends the combined print job to the printer side to form images. Also, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-027492 proposes a method which allows the user to designate files to be printed and their print order at an operation unit upon printing stored image data, and processes a plurality of files set by the user as a series of image groups which have a sequence in the setting order.
The above two methods handle a plurality of print jobs as one print job, and can prevent the results of these print jobs from getting mixed up upon discharge.
However, since the method of Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 09-134261 must combine jobs before transmission to the printer and then transmit a combined job to the printer, the load on the information processing apparatus side and that on the network become heavier. Also, the method of Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-027492 requires much labor of the user, since the user must designate files and their print order at the operation unit. Furthermore, when the user forgets to designate a given file, a required file cannot be printed in some cases.